Traditional nail polishes based on oil or water diluent must wait for several minutes to hours to allow the oil or water to dry to form a coat on nails. Water base polish often needs an hour to dry. Even oil base polish has solvent to help evaporation of the oil, it still often takes almost 30 minutes to dry. During the drying time, the nail polish coat is soft and easy to get scratched, dented, or deteriorated. Therefore, it is desirable to dry the nail polish in a shorter time period to have a longer and better wear.
Some conventional nail polishes show faster drying rates. However, such polishes typically content nitrocellulose which tends to cause the polish coat on nail brittle and less elastic. And, it eventually becomes easier to chipping off after application on nails. Some water-based nail polishes use drying accelerators to raise the drying rate, which often causes instability of the polish that the pigment, water, and polymer to separate. The stability issue is that pigment is easy to separate from the oil and water base in 3-6 months, which especially in water base nail polish that water, raw material and pigment all separate. Water base polish has extremely bad pigmentation because the materials functionally limit.
Even oil base nail polish is better than water base nail polish, but it is still poor pigmentation in some colors. Materials can be easily dried out in storage. Especially, in water base nail polish, materials dry out after 2 to 3 months. Water and raw material easily gets residue and gets harden inside the container. Color of traditional oil or water based nail polish can dye on nature nail, which will be hard to be removed from the nail after the nail polish is dried. Some water base nail polish coat only can be peeled in small pieces from the nail surface, which remains a lot of small residues of the nail polish on nail and cannot be cleaned well without using polish remover such as acetone.
Also, some fast-drying nail polishes contain plasticizer to increase the flexibility and durability of the polymer film. Normally the plasticizer include camphor and/or dibutyl phthalate (DBP). However, dibutyl phthalate has been in a controversy linking to cancer in recent years.
Some fast-drying nail polishes also contain multiple types of polymers providing different functions, such as nitrocellulose for viscosity and polyethyl acrylate for enhancing adhesion. As stated before, nitrocellulose tends to cause the coating brittle and less elastic. The polyethyl acrylate is formed by reaction of acrylate or acrylic monomers, which may cause redness, swelling, and pain in the nail bed even if a trace of acrylate monomers is remained in the polymerized solution. Therefore, it is desired to solve these issues.